In the syllabus, this is listed as a “Week 1” assignment. Truth be told, we’re kicking it off at the beginning of the semester, but we hope this will be an ongoing (and burgeoning) effort all semester long…

We are embarking on a fantastic journey. It’s a leadership quest to gain the competence and capacity required to foster sustainability, social justice and participatory culture.

We will be charting new territory. But it’s also true that each of us has had a range of experience with these topics along the way. This Wiki is a place for you to share your favorite web resources in each of these three areas. The assumption is that you’ve all got relevant resources that would benefit other group members. Let’s share ’em. We’ll raise our collective IQ by sharing the stuff we like.

This Wiki will function like a “Google Doc”–read, edit and/or view history–those are your choices. But be sure to insert your content! And don’t just “add on” to what’s been written, take the time to regroup items, update the overall structure, summarize and/or provide thematic analysis, and yes, edit for grammar or word usage.

Leadership

Leadership of any group can sometimes feel like this. If we intend to become leaders in sustainability, social justice, and participatory culture it’s not a bad idea that we stay current on ideas in leadership theory and recognize our power to impact change with even the simplest of everyday actions. This TED talk by Drew Dudley is a fun reminder of how we can have an impact (for positive or negative) on those around us and, perhaps, not even realize it at the time. It is a good reminder to be aware of what you model as a leader. Roselinde Torres gives another great TED talk on qualities of great leaders. While focused of a business audience, the lessons pertain to our work as well.

Simon Sinek, an inspiring speaker, with a life journey that brings into light his belief of leadership. Simon makes it easy to understand what it takes to be a leader. Simon Sinek – TED

Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live with Acceptable Risk by Dr. Ben Carson is urging those to build an understanding that not all choices will yield successful returns. Guilt and despair is often the primary component for depression, and can deter an individuals’ growth. Understanding from those choices and growing will help in the development that leaders often have to make those painful decisions.

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell’s addresses the ability of those who are able to masterfully analyze and respond within a “blink” of an eye. Impulsive thinkers can often be perceived as not thought provoking or making “un-educated” decisions. However, this book highlights that many individuals process information faster than most which can be used in high pressure situations. It addresses the fight and flight response.

The Attitude of Leadership: Taking the Lead and Keeping It by Keith Harrell
Mr. Harrell’s approach to leadership is blended with inspirational approach to those who are new to leadership positions, and aspire to maintain a sense of themselves, without compromising their values.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey
This book is helpful in identifying principles of leadership, and what traits have been successful by those in leadership.

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Theory as noted by Wikipedia as the most comprehensive database of surveys addressing society’s culture on values and behavior. Professor Geert Hofstede created what he references as the six dimensions of national culture. America is a melting pot of multi-national cultures and perhaps this site will shed light on the deeper cultural norms and behaviors of our society and help us better understand groups outside our borders. The site offers an overwhelming large database of researchable material.

Educational leadership programs often put little to no emphasis on the importance of social issues and their relationships to the realm of education. Culture, power, equity, and influence are topics that are rarely (if at all) mentioned in leader preparation programs or workshops. This journal article entitled “Educating School Leaders for Social Justice” goes over the many topics involved in social justice scholarship and leadership. As we progress through the 21st century, more than ever, it is critical for school leaders to have an awareness (a flow, if you will) in order to be true champions in the field.

Sustainability
If you would like to enhance your understanding of climate science, a fabulous website to check out is www.skepticalscience.com. The authors debunk climate science myths, providing basic, intermediate and advance science explanations for each myth addressed. Skeptical Science is a great tool for science communicators who seek to match content with audience needs and interests.

Smithsonian Magazine- smithsonianmag.org has a wide array of archived articles that relate to science, environment and culture. The September 2016 magazine is devoted to stories that relate to the theme “Black in America”. This issue has an article called “The Road to Freedom”, by I. Wilkerson, that is specifically about the migration of African-Americans north from 1910-1970 and the effects that are still felt today.

MDPI-Open Access Publishing SustainabilityThis is a server that organizes articles and studies written into categories. The user can specify a keyword, an author or a journal publication. This will be useful later when looking for the needle in a haystack in terms of supportive evidence, data, and resources to support our claims. It offers an entire section regarding studies specifically on sustainability.

UNESCO ESD– The official group behind the movements regarding Sustainability Development in Education (ESD), In addition, it highlights a lot of their initiatives and pinpoints their goals. The website offers a lot of information regarding specific initiatives that they are endorsing and publications supporting their cause.

IonE – the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota is a great source of information on issues related to the environment and sustainability. As a part of their mission they produce a regular, e-newsletter that is a great snapshot of current research and efforts in environment and sustainability.

Top 10 Myths About Sustainability–http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/top-10-myths-about-sustainability/-Fantastic article regarding myths about sustainability. Attempts to define sustainability for people who don’t talk about it professionally. The article is not laden with jargon which makes it relate-able. It also includes a lot of information and tidbits to use during debate and conversation regarding environmental issues.

Sustainability: Principles and Practice by Margaret Robertson (2014), gives an accessible and comprehensive overview of the interdisciplinary field of sustainability. The focus is on furnishing solutions and equipping the student with both conceptual understanding and technical skills for the workplace. The companion website on the Routledge Sustainability Hub offers a wide range of resources for everyone – whether you are a teacher, a student, a professional or a citizen of the earth curious to discover more about the many facets of sustainability. The text’s resources for instructors include a very comprehensive list of further readings and websites.

Developing Ecological Consciousness: Path to a Sustainable World, by Christopher Uhl (Rowman & Littlefield Publisher, Inc., 2004) Here’s a wonderful description by Elizabeth E. Meacham, PhD. “Dr. Uhl has been a biology and environmental studies professor at Penn State for over 25 years. In the course of his illustrious career as a researcher, he found himself asking the same question I often ask as a scholar and teacher. How do we empower students to feel engaged in environmental issues rather than overwhelmed and hopeless? Dr. Uhl succinctly summarizes what he came to in his search to empower, rather than alienate, depress, and permanently disempower, his environmental education students.”

Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, by Daniel Jaffee (2007). Jaffee provides an in-depth investigation into fair trade markets around the world and takes a critical look at their impact to the overall global economy. He provides insight into his research with indigenous coffee growers in Mexico to get a better glimpse into the environmental, economic, and social effects of fair trade practices. It is an excellent read into the many social justice issues surrounding small farmers and concerned consumers.

Sustainability Community Online-http://www.sustainable.org/-is formerly known as the Sustainable Communities Network (SCN) website, which was established in the mid of 1990s. It aims to make the puliv have a readily access to the information on sustainability around the world.

Social Justice
Movies tell a story. They draw you into an unfolding narrative, engaging your intellect and emotions. Two kid-friendly movies that powerfully convey social justice themes are The Perfect Game and Remember the Titans. Inspired by the life and work of Professor Melvin Tolson, The Great Debaters tells the story of how a group of African American students in the deep south use their voice and intellect to advance social and political issues. The Free State of Jones is a Civil War-era movie that follows the life of Newton Knight, a Confederate soldier who leaves the war and takes on a different fight of racial inequality in Louisiana.

Documentary films often offer a more focused view of an issue. The documentary Rich Hill gives a look at generational poverty and the limited resources available to help these young people toward a different track. An enlightened look at the small, Missouri town helps the viewer to see trends and issues that could be addressed in order to bring hope and change to these communities and families. To couple this with the fictional Winter’s Bone – another Missouri based story by Daniel Woodrell gives a powerful look at how limited access to education and opportunity looks in rural Missouri towns. Winter’s Bone is set in the southern area of Missouri near Poplar Bluff. The New York Times review Hillbilly Noir gives a great summary of the book, which was adapted into a film version. NPR interview with the author reveals that the book was written based in true events.

Literary publications are a great source of information offering perspectives that may help us find balance in today’s complex world of domestic and global issues. THE ATLANTIC, a moderate literary and cultural commentary publication, provides a direction for social justice discussions. A more recent and notable article “The Rise of the American “Others” provides a different conversation to social justice seeking to broaden the conversation about the importance of Hispanic ethnicity.

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer and founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In his TED talk, We need to talk about an injustice, he highlights where the United States is in comparison to the rest of the world in terms of how many people are in prison. Further, he sheds light on the broken parts of the system of the American justice system that does not work fairly for all its people. Mr. Stevenson is doing terrific work at the Equal Justice Initiative, where they not only advocate for changes, but lay out in clear, stark terms the evolution of slavery.

Dr. Ruby Payne has dedicated her life’s research to helping educators to work with students who live in a generational cycle of poverty. By developing a framework to understanding, she helps us to see how often in a formal education environment the educators are pulled from a middle class background and lack knowledge of hidden rules that are intertwined in varying class structure. Her full book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, written in 1995, is widely taught in teacher education programs and public school professional development settings, but she recognized that other nonformal educators would benefit from the idea and released “Understanding and Working with Students and Adults from Poverty”, as part of her Poverty Series.

Dr. Erica is a stay at home mom who authors the blog What We Do All Day. Here she creates kids’ book lists. Her January 11, 2016 post “Social Justice Books for Kids to Teach about Global Issues” was retweeted by the National Council for Teachers of English. The list gives us 21 titles that reach a wide range of global social issues.

In a powerful episode of This American Life, Nikole Hannah Jones, an award winning investigative reporter for New York Times Magazine, discusses the continued segregation of the American school system and how it is supported through systemic policy and action. She uses data to show how the abandoned, but purposeful, desegregation policies of the 80s were working, but that deep systemic problems and “white flight” has set the progress back. It is a two part series that begins here.

Tim Wise is among the nation’s leading anti-racist educators and essayists. He is an activist, essayist and author of seven books on racism, inequality and white privilege. His editorials and perspectives on social justice illuminate many aspects that are “hidden” or forgotten by many members of the white community. He often times writes about the concept of white rage and its implications on other populations. An example of this topic can be found here.

Bloomberg News Online may not be the first place an interested party looks to understand more about social injustice, but I understand that it is very difficult to address social injustices without understanding the economics that drives the many laws the often do have profound unequal social outcomes. A more recent article “An Equation that Subtracts from Inequality” looks at the growing disparity of STEM programs in America.

Social Justice Journal A collection of journals founded in 1974 that explore many issues within social justice such as prisoner re-entry, LGBT issues, financial crisis, race issues, and immigration just to name a few. The site also links to their blog.

Inside Higher Education provides a framework of many concepts connected to social justice, through a lens involving faculty, staff, and other campus partners. Apart from practical examples and ways to integrate these concepts into experiences college aged students are going through, the blog encourages readers to research on their own and share findings. It is a meeting place for many professionals in the field of higher education.

Invitation to World Literature (PBS) series: The passionate loves and longings, hopes and fears of every culture live on forever in their stories. Here is your invitation to literature from around the world and across time.

Carol Anderson’s White Rage Chapter 3 focuses on the great migration north, relating the history of 1000s of African American’s move from the south to the north, to escape the horrors of the Jim Crow era (or so they thought). Another great source of information on this episode in history is The Warmth of Other Suns. In class discussion, we learned that class member’s family is mentioned in the book!

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and activist who is well-known for his influence in the critical pedagogy movement. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire discusses the justifications of oppression and the relationships between the oppressor and the oppressed. The book is a must read if you want to think critically about culture, equity, power, and influence.

It is evident that society is changing quickly in America. Education, as a social institution, plays a critical role in molding young people to think about the changes that they want to see in the world. In this TED Talk, Artika Tyner disusses the importance of preparing young people to “share and define the moral content of our nation” by placing importance on using education to lead social change.

Participatory CultureParticipatory culture includes the ways we engage each other around things that matter. It includes community projects, service learning opportunities, heritage festivals, service organizations, bioblitzes, citizen science projects, neighborhood groups, watershed associations, historical societies, meals on wheels, food pantries, community supported agriculture (CSA’s)…the list is endless.

In Elkins, West Virginia, the Augusta Heritage Center provides courses and apprenticeship opportunities in traditional Appalachian arts and handicrafts. Learning how to make a wooden barrel, do clogging, or play classic tunes on the fiddle connect people to heritage and to each other. In Minnesota, similar opportunities are offered at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais.

In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a speech to the graduates of Kenyon College. His speech essentially attempts to answer what leads us to a good, fulfilling life, and surmises that reprogramming the way we think about the world in an automatic and routine way, in order to recognize each individual’s place in a vast world, will ultimately lead to empathy. In a world where a person sees otherness as something to be respected, then we will have a call to be unified and help through service to each other.

Like movies and books, music intertwines itself with culture. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio has a well-developed educational program that is aimed at helping to use the lessons of music to teach students and teachers. They host an online teacher development program as well as many face to face courses through the education department. One example of the courses, exhibits, and lectures they host is on the history of protest and advocacy music. The protest songs are but one notable and powerful exhibit. The first protest song is credited to Billie Holiday in 1939 (her song and its impact is fully annotated in Dorian Lynskey’s book 33 Revolutions Per Minute). On an evening in 1939, Billie Holiday, with no warning, dimmed the lights on the stage so that she was but a figure in the darkness, and then with her soulful voice, sang “Southern trees bear a strange fruit” (Lynskey 4). The crowd shuffled and sat silently through “Strange Fruit” and when she was finished, the formerly boistrous crowd was silent, not knowing how to respond, and in this moment what was traditionally considered entertainment became thought-provoking and movement making. Protest songs, social songs remain a steady part of culture and it began with the courage of a strong woman to create a new and powerful venue to share a message.

Ron Ritchhart’s book Creating Cultures of Thinking is part of the Cultures of Thinking project -which is a subgroup of Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Project Zero. The book aims to help educators to see learning in terms of complex habit of thinking in order to foster deep learning, problem-solving, and critical action skills. The book uses case studies, problem based learning, and self assessment to divulge eight forces to help foster these skills.

It’s an understatement to say that technology has rapidly changed our world, but it’s not always easy to see how systems and groups are changing with it. In Connecting to Change The World, the authors demonstrate how networks for social impact are changing the way groups work together, eliminating the top-down/one leader approach, to building many points of equal connections.

Henry Jenkins has dedicated much of his scholarly career to exploring the complexity of Participatory Culture. In addition to his book Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics (2015), Henry Jenkins blogs about participatory culture and social media. Throughout he researched the themes of citizens using technology to create rather than consume. In addition, he discusses in depth the effects of social media and other technology on politics, trends, economics, and social norms. Jenkins also brings to the table many other professionals to share their viewpoints on Participatory Culture and includes texts about the future of Participatory Culture and the challenges surrounding the topic.

Fostering Sustainable Behavior: An Introduction to Community-Based Social Marketing by Doug McKenzie-Mohr and William Smith (1999) could be placed under multiple categories on this list. The book aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to community-based social marketing and how it is being applied throughout the world to foster sustainable behavior. It introduces the five steps of community-based social marketing (selecting behaviors, identifying barriers & benefits, developing strategies, conducting a pilot, and broad-scale implementation), and showcases numerous programs illustrating its use. There is also a great online site (www.cbsm.com) that includes the complete contents of the book, as well as searchable databases of articles, case studies, turnkey strategies, and discussion forums for sharing information and asking questions of others.

VOLTA (Voyage of Learning Teachers’ Academy)is truly a remarkable program-serving educators in the use of Forest Park as an educational learning environment. For 15 years VOLTA has been educating teachers in the St. regional area on how to use the iconic Forest Park as an outdoor learning lab fostering meaningful connections for its participants. From the beautiful eco-systems to the cultural institutions teachers participate in an eight day intensive professional development program learning how to bridge education with this 1,300 acre park. The many virtues the park from its natural savannahs, prairies, and waterways to cultural history provides not only a learning environment, but also a future destination for all its participants.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Conservation Training Center hosts a webinar series that features nationally recognized citizen science projects. These programs are easy access points for educators (formal and non-formal). Archived recordings can be viewed here.

NASA: Climate Change provides information and evidence helpful in educating both students and adults in climate change. The site links to facts, articles, NASA, Solutions, and resources. http://climate.nasa.gov/

The Smithsonian is opening the National Museum of African American History and Culture September, 24. The site and experience, “transcends the boundaries of race and culture that divide us, and becomes a lens into a story that unites us all. There have been a lot of pre-opening day reviews of the Smithsonian’s new museum focusing on the African American experience. Many reviewers think the Smithsonian nailed it. If the museum’s storyline, exhibits, recollections, and the built-in tension between hope and despair, resilience and brokenness, and opportunity and oppression resonate with attendees, then I predict that Heath and Heath’s SUCCESs Framework could be used in part to explain what worked and why. The SUCCESs Framework suggests that in order for your ideas “to stick,” i.e., to be memorable, compelling and to inspire action, they need to be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and use Stories. I’ve used Made to Stick (2007) with numerous graduate and undergraduate students–always to rave review. (Aixia Feng originally shared this on our group Forum, but the PDF didn’t attach. So thanks, Aixia, for calling our attention to the Heath and Heath’s classic text.)

September 2016 Smithsonian magazine: Black in America. In this month’s issue contributors expand the social realms: John Lewis (major figure in the civil rights movements of the 1960’s), Jenna Wortham (she considers Twitter’s role in African-American life), Deborah Willis (leading scholar of African-American photography), Danny Clinch (musical videos director- he is covering the International Blues Challenge in Memphis), Toure’ (journalist and former co-host of MSNBC, author of 5 books) Natasha Trethewey (poet laureate from 2013-2014, Oprah Winfrey( she reflects on Harriet Tubman), Sheila E, Spike Lee and certainly not least- Ilyasah Shabazz (she is the daughter of Malcolm X)-Her reflections speak of times when famous African-American entertainers were praised but not accepted and made to stay in separate hotels during the civil rights. She speaks as to how striving for educational values helped to secure her mindset in being an activist and professor just like her mother) I find myself glued to this September issue as I learn about the personal reflections of those who helped keep the flame burning for social justice.smithsonian.com

Over 100 years ago a Danish immigrant was known for trying to bring the “frontier prairie” back into Chicago. Jens Jensen lead the movement to conserve natural areas. He is also known for leading social reform in Chicago. Jensen created green spaces in the densely populated and often poor west and south sides of Chicago. There is a very good documentary of Jens Jensen title Living Green.

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Discussion (2)

I have a long history of enjoying murder mystery novels. There is a series of books about a black private detective, Easy Rawlins. Social justice is a strong theme throughout the series. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Easy:

Ezekiel “Easy” Porterhouse Rawlins is a fictional character created by mystery author Walter Mosley. Rawlins is a black private investigator, a hard-boiled detective and World War II veteran living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. He is featured in a series of best-selling mysteries set from the 1940s to the 1960s.